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This is a unique account of working-class childhood during the British industrial revolution. Using more than 600 autobiographies written by working men of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Jane Humphries illuminates working-class childhood in contexts untouched by conventional sources and facilitates estimates of age at starting work, social mobility, the extent of apprenticeship, and the duration of schooling. The classic era of industrialization, 1790-1850, apparently saw an upsurge in child labour. While the memoirs implicate mechanization and the division of labour in this increase, they also show that fatherlessness and large sibsets, common in these turbulent, high-mortality, and high-fertility times, often cast children as partners and supports for mothers struggling to hold families together. The book offers unprecedented insights into child labour, family life, careers, and schooling. Its images of suffering, stoicism, and occasional childish pleasures put the humanity back into economic history and the trauma back into the industrial revolution.

Unique account of childhood during the industrial revolution that draws on working people's own accounts of their lives

Sheds new light on the individual experience of industrialisation and its impact on working-class family life

Integrates quantitative analysis with social, family and demographic history

Prizes

Winner of the 2011 Gyorgi Ranki Biennial Prize in European Economic History, Economic History Association

Reviews & endorsements

"Recommended." -Choice

"This is a large and important book … It deserves to become not only a classic study of childhood, but also of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. As Humphries herself notes, it has been a long time coming, but for the reader it has been well worth the wait." -History Today

"Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution is richly innovative in its marrying of economic data with life stories. The voices of the children – stoical, matter of fact, and moving in their ordinariness – jump off the page. There is no other historical study of British labour during the industrial revolution that so vividly brings to life the world of the working-class child." -History Workshop Journal

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